We live in the city, don’t have a home in the country or some place to escape to. So we decided to make our outdoors to be a family project in the backyard. Using only what we could learn on YouTube, build a patio with a fire pit and make s’mores together. /1
Our space is 10’x11’ out the back door. We ordered materials from the good folks at Lurveys and they brought it to the curb. Shockingly, it was about 8000 lbs of materials—gravel, sand, and stones 
Meanwhile, we dug out the space down about 7-9” and lined with weed fabric. This was hard work. Plus we hadn’t thought about where all the dirt would go. Built two huge mounds off the the left. /3
So far, just like YouTube. We don’t have a driveway so it was a whole lot of trips with a gorilla dump cart to get the gravel. If you do this, MEASURE PRECISELY. We had one corner too short and had to dig more and try to shove the gravel in the trench. /4
After shoveling we had to pound it flat with a tamper. That was the worst. 95 degrees outside for both days of tamping. No one wanted a photo of that. /5
We got a random collection of different sized stones and luckily my wife is good at puzzles so she put us together an order that would fit (in theory). /6
YouTube made it seem like putting the sand down and getting it level would be easy. We had a heck of a time with this. Getting one part level and then putting on stones and then finding out they weren’t level and taking them out and leveling all the sand again
Finally we made progress laying the stones. And of course, the last one didn’t fit! We were about 1/2 inch too short on the E/W dimension. Ugh. Pull them up and scoot them over.
Followed by hammering in edge reatraints, filling the joints with polymeric sand, Renting a plate compactor from Home Depot to get it all between the joints (though it wrecked the leveling work above) and spray with a hose. Order a propane fire pit from Walmart. Ta da!
My conclusions fr/our COVID patio project:
1) it’s amazing what you can learn on YouTube and have delivered right to your house
2) do not do this. What the hell were we thinking?
3) what do you do with 5 cu ft of leftover sand and .5 of gravel out in front of your house?
1) it’s amazing what you can learn on YouTube and have delivered right to your house
2) do not do this. What the hell were we thinking?
3) what do you do with 5 cu ft of leftover sand and .5 of gravel out in front of your house?
One last thing for you bird people. We finished the whole thing and cleaned up but the sand on the side is attracting packs of birds that come down to wallow around in the sand and it throws dirt all over. Seriously, packs of like 10-20 birds multiple times a day. WTF, birds?
There’s an entire beach of sand 1500 yards away on 57th st and you can FLY you stupid birds. Why are you coming here to mess up our backyard for this sand?
